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Lesson Plan - Get It!

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Your body needs good food like a car needs good fuel.

What happens when a car doesn't have fuel or has dirty fuel?
Does it run properly or at all?

No! It's the same with the human body.

When the body doesn't have good food and essential nutrients from food, it doesn't run properly and can break down.

So, what is nutrition exactly?

Nutrition is simply the study of food.

All food contains nutrients, and those nutrients help us stay healthy. Nutrients are the healthy parts within food - like vitamins and proteins - that all living things need to live and grow.

Watch this video on healthy eating.

Healthy foods like vegetables, fruits, grains, and more provide the human body with nutrients because they contain important vitamins and minerals the body uses to work properly.

For example, oranges contain vitamin C.

Have you ever heard that you should drink orange juice or eat oranges when you're sick with a cold?

That's because vitamin C helps the body heal and get stronger.

Different vitamins help the body do different things well. When you eat foods that have many different vitamins, it helps your entire body function properly.

Fruits and vegetables are amazing foods because they contain lots of different nutrients that we need! Learn more in the video below.

There sure are a lot of fruits and vegetables!

Can you think of different fruits and vegetables that match every color of the rainbow?

Take a moment and try!

Now, let's learn more about vitamins and what they do.

The table below shows some common vitamins that the body needs as well as some of the foods in which they are found. You can also see one of the ways these vitamins help the human body.

Vitamin	Foods With Vitamin	Ways Vitamin Helps Us
vitamin A	carrots, sweet potatoes	helps your eyes
vitamin B12	clams, fish	helps blood cells stay healthy
vitamin C	oranges, lemons	helps the immune system and body to heal
vitamin D	milk	helps the teeth and bones stay strong
vitamin E	sunflower seeds, almonds	helps the immune system

Another important part of good nutrition is having a balanced diet. This means you aren't having too much or too little of the different types of healthy foods your body needs to work correctly.

For example, let's say you really love strawberries, and they were all you wanted to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If you only ate strawberries and nothing else, your body would be missing very important nutrients and vitamins from other foods and would not work properly.

A balanced diet includes grains, vegetables, fruits, proteins, and dairy or calcium. You can see the different foods that belong to each group in the image below:

healthy plate

Eating a variety of nutritious foods like the ones you see in the picture can help your body to stay healthy and strong. Explore them in this next video.

Let's move on to the Got It? section and test your knowledge!